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“A purer form of government”: African American constitutionalism in the founding of Liberia

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Journal of Transatlantic Studies Aims and scope

Abstract

The African Americans who wrote the Liberian constitution of 1847 represent one of the few instances where Americans engaged national constitution-making after 1787. While the Liberians adopted many aspects of the American constitution, they also made substantial changes implicitly critiquing the American original and forging a uniquely African American constitutionalism. Examining the Liberian constitution contributes to three fields of study: comparative constitutionalism, American political development, and African American political thought. In comparative constitutionalism, the Liberians show the adaptability of American constitutional principles to the west coast of Africa. In American political development, the Liberians provide a snapshot of what a subset of Americans disliked about the American constitution and what they changed when given the chance. Finally, the Liberians demonstrate how ideas of black nationalism and American constitutionalism may be intertwined in African American political thought.

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Notes

  1. See James Madison’s letters to Caleb Wallace and John Brown in Marvin Myers, ed. The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981), 25–43.

  2. Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton, “Timeline of Constitution,” Comparative Constitutions Project. http://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/chronology/.

  3. Mary F. Goodwin, “America’s Only Foreign Colonial Settlement Liberia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 55, no. 4 (Oct., 1947): 333–338; John Saillant, “The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson’s Colonizationism and Black Virginians’ Migration to Liberia, 1776–1840,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 3 (Spring, 1998): 269–282; Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Claude Andrew Clegg, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Eugene S. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists: The U.S. Navy and Liberia, 1819–1845.” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 107–134; Brandon Mills, “’The United States of Africa’: Liberian Independence and the Contested Meaning of a Black Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 79–107. See also the essays in Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick, ed. New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017); Susan E. Lindsey, Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020).

  4. Amos J. Beyan, The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State: A Historical Perspective, 1822–1900 (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991), 95. See also Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 141.

  5. Ran Hirschl, Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114.

  6. Aurel Croissant, “Ways of Constitution-Making in Southeast Asia: Actors, Interests, Dynamics,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 36, no. 1 (April 2014), 23–50; Laurel E. Miller, ed., Framing the State in Times of Transition: Case Studies in Constitution Making (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2010); Dan Juma, “Pre-Commitment in contemporary constitution making? African and Kenyan experiences reviewed,” Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America 44, no. 4 (2011): 482–515; George Athan Billias, American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, 1776–1989: A Global Perspective (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Ran Hirschl and Christopher L. Eisgruber, “Prologue: North American constitutionalism?” International Journal of Constitutional Law 4, no. 2 (April 2006), 203–212; “Forty-Ninth Parallel Constitutionalism: How Canadians Invoke American Constitutional Traditions,” Harvard Law Review 120, no. 7 (May 2007): 1936–1957; Stephen Gardbaum, The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  7. Alexander Stroh and Charlotte Heyl, “Institutional Diffusion, Strategic Insurance, and the Creation of West African Constitutional Courts,” Comparative Politics 47, no. 2 (January 2015): 170–171.

  8. For example, see Keith E. Whittington, Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  9. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 56.

  10. For an excellent discussion of how opponents of African American civil rights attempted to use the American constitution to obstruct political action during Reconstruction, see Jeffrey K. Tulis and Nicole Mellow, Legacies of Losing in American Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 68–101.

  11. For an overview of these changes and how they were opposed, see Milkis, The President and the Parties; Sarah Burns, The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 128–181; Jeremy D. Bailey, The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 126–150.

  12. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 17–18. See also James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Jeffrey K. Tulis, “The Two Constitutional Presidencies,” in The Presidency and the Political System, ed. Michael Nelson (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2014); Stephen F. Knott, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). For similar concepts on how divergent traditions may overlap in American political development, see Elvin T. Lim, The Lovers’ Quarrel: The Two Foundings & American Political Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  13. Carl Patrick Burrowes, Black Christian Republicanism: The Writings of Hilary Teage (1805–1853), founder of Liberia (Bomi County, Liberia: Know Your Self Press, 2016), 36.

  14. Bjørn F. Stillion Southward, Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), 86. In some sources, Teage’s name is spelled “Teague.”

  15. For example, see Burrowes, Black Christian Republicanism; Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Political Thought: Its development in West Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967), 85–109, 208–233; Guy Martin, African Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 47–48; George Shepperson, “Abolitionism and African Political Thought,” Transition 12 (Jan.-Feb., 1964): 22–26.

  16. For example, see Kwando M. Kinshasa, Emigration vs. Assimilation: The Debate in the African American Press, 1827–1861 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2012); Richard Blackett, “Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell: Black Americans in Search of an African Colony” The Journal of Negro History 62, no. 1 (Jan., 1977): 1–25. See also the selections of Alexander Crummell’s writing in Angela Jones, ed. The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (New York: Routledge, 2013), 73–86; the opposed positions of Augustus Washington—who immigrated to Liberia—and Frederick Douglass as presented in Herbert J. Storing, ed. What Country Have I? Political Writings by Black Americans (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970); as well as the multiple selections on “Emigration” in Howard Brotz, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought 1850–1920 (New York: Routledge, 2017). Notably, none of the thinkers cited in these works were involved in founding Liberia.

  17. M.B. Akpan, “Black Imperialism: Americo-Liberian Rule over the African Peoples of Liberia, 1841–1964,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 7, no. 2 (1973): 219.

  18. Howard Temperly, “African-American Aspirations and the Settlement of Liberia,” in After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents, ed. Howard Temperly (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000), 77.

  19. Hilary Teage, “Virginia,” in Burrowes, Black Christian Republicanism, 86–87.

  20. Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, Constitutional Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  21. Justin Buckley Dyer, Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 77.

  22. Frederick Douglass, “Country, Conscience, and the Anti-Slavery Cause: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, May 11, 1847” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One—Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 2:57.

  23. For a summary of how the motives of the society members varied widely, considering not only the impacts colonization would have on slavery but also the American labor and economic system more generally and even Christian evangelical efforts, see Burin, Peculiar Solution, 13–14; Beyan, American Colonization Society, 3–5; Matthew Spooner, “‘I Know This Scheme is from God:’ Toward a Reconsideration of the Origins of the American Colonization Society” Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 4 (2014): 559–575.

  24. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), 186.

  25. For discussion of Paul Cuffe’s efforts, see Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 40–41; Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 17.

  26. Saigbe Boley, Liberia: The Rise and Fall of the First Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 10; Monday B. Abasiatti, “The Search for Independence: New World Blacks in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 1787–1847,” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 1 (Sep., 1992): 107–116. Sierra Leone did not gain its independence until 1961.

  27. Beyan, American Colonization Society, 51–67; Boley, Liberia, 13–17; James Ciment, Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 10.

  28. “Constitution of 1820,” in Charles Henry Huberich, The Political and Legislative History of Liberia (New York: Central Book Company, Inc., 1947), 1:146–147.

  29. Beyan, American Colonization Society, 85.

  30. American Colonization Society, “Colonial Constitution and Plan of Civil Government” African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825–1849) 11, no. 1 (Jan. 1835), 21.

  31. See American Colonization Society, “Report on Auxiliary Relations” African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825–1849) 13, no. 3 (Mar., 1837): 75–79; American Colonization Society, “Convention of Societies Having Colonies on the Coast of Africa” African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825–1849) 15, no. 12 (Jul., 1839), 205–207; Huberich, History, 1:565.

  32. Huberich, History, 1:565. For discussion of this settlement and its independent history, see Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa: The Maryland Colonization Society, 1831–1857 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

  33. Mills, “United States of Africa,” 87–88; Tom W. Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980), 37–38; P.J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 82–93.

  34. “Monrovia Draft Constitution,” in Huberich, History, 1:639–646.

  35. Huberich, History, 1:584.

  36. Ibid., 1:666.

  37. “Buchanan Draft Constitution,” in Huberich, History, 1:649–656.

  38. Beyan, American Colonization Society, 88. While Roberts was the first African America governor of Liberia he was not the first African American governor of a colonial settlement. That distinction belongs to John Brown Russwurm who was appointed governor of Maryland in Africa in 1836.

  39. Mills, “United States of Africa,” 88.

  40. C. Abaymi Cassell, Liberia: History of the First African Republic (New York: Fountainhead Publishers, Inc., 1970), 127–129; Mills, 86–87.

  41. Joseph Tracy, “Sovereignty of Liberia,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 21, no. 4 (Apr., 1845): 97–102.

  42. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists,” 108; Miller, Black Nationality, 57. The Slave Trade Act of 1819 was passed to curb the Atlantic slave trade and allowed the navy to relocate captured Africans back to Africa. Monroe argued the colonization project was consistent with those provisions.

  43. John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, ed., Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1875) 4:293.

  44. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists,” 130.

  45. Ibid., 131. House of Representatives, “Report No. 283, ‘African Colonization,’” Feb. 28, 1843, in Report of Mr. Kennedy, of Maryland, From the Committee on Commerce of the House of Representatives of the United States on the African Slave Trade United States 27"' Congress, 3rd Session (Freeport, NY, 1971), 4–7.

  46. Abel P. Upshur, “Letter to Henry S. Fox,” September 25, 1843, Maryland Colonization Journal 2 (July 1844), 12.

  47. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists,” 129–132.

  48. Boley, Liberia, 26.

  49. Cassell, Liberia, 129; Boley, Liberia, 26. See also Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present and Future of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 74–78.

  50. “Sovereignty of Liberia,” reprinted from the Liberia Herald in Africa Repository and Colonial Journal 22, no. 4 (Apr. 1846), 25.

  51. Teage and Roberts qtd. in Mills, “United States of Africa,” 88.

  52. Beyan, American Colonization Society, 93.

  53. Carl Patrick Burrowes, “Black Christian Republicanism: A Southern Ideology in Early Liberia, 1822 to 1847” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 30.

  54. American Colonization Society, “Extracts from the Liberia Herald,” The African Repository 25, no. 8 (Aug. 1849): 246; U.S. Congress, Senate. Roll of the Emigrants That Have Been Sent to the Colony of Liberia, West Africa, by the American Colonization Society and Its Auxiliaries, to September, 1843, &c; Census of the Colony of Liberia, September, 1843 with Agricultural Report, Report on Commerce, &c., School Report, Institutions for Religious Improvement, and Statement of Crime in the Colony. 28th Congress, 2nd Session, 1845. S. Doc. 150.

  55. Teage’s father, Colin Teage, was president of the convention which wrote the Monrovia draft while the younger Teage served as the convention’s clerk. See Huberich, History, 1:646. For Lewis’ compilation of statutes, see Huberich, History, 1:730.

  56. Elizabeth H. Flowers, “‘A Man, a Christian, and a Gentleman?’: John Day, Southern Baptists, and the Nineteenth-Century Mission to Liberia” Baptist History and Heritage 43, no. 2 (Spring 2008); July, Origins of Modern Africa, 93; D. Elwood Dunn, ed. The Annual Messages of the Presidents of Liberia, 1848–2010: State of the Nation Addresses to the National Legislature From Joseph Jenkins Roberts to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 1:12; J.H.T. McPherson, History of Liberia (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1973), 48. Elijah Johnson’s son, Hilary Richard Wright Johnson, became the first native-born president of Liberia in 1884.

  57. The primary extant source we have on the Liberian constitution convention comes from the journal of Dr. J.W. Lugenbeel who sent extracts concerning the convention to the secretary of the ACS. See J.W. Lugenbeel, “Extracts From My Journal,” in Huberich, History, 1:822–827.

  58. Lugenbeel in Huberich, History, 1:827.

  59. James Madison, “Federalist 39,” in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. J.R. Pole (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, Inc., 2005), 211.

  60. Liberia const. (1847), art. II, sec. 1; U.S. const., art. 1, sec. 8–10.

  61. The importance of preserving state power in the American constitution is evident throughout the debates over its creation at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. See James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison, ed. Adrienne Koch (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987). Similarly, supporters of the Constitution tried to allay Antifederalists fears of consolidation by insisting that the states were integral components of the new constitution. For Antifederalists elucidating their concerns, see “Federal Farmer I,” “Brutus I,” “Brutus XV,” and “Agrippa IV” in The Anti-Federalist: Writings by the Opponents of the Constitution, ed. Herbert J. Storing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 32–39, 108–117, 182–187, 234–236. For examples of the Federalists arguing that the constitution incorporated and needed the states, see Madison, “Federalist 39,” 206–211; “Federalist 42,” 227–233; “Federalist 45,” 250–254; “Federalist 46,” 255–260.

  62. Antonio McDaniel, “Extreme Mortality in Nineteenth-Century Africa: The Case of Liberian Immigrants,” Demography 29, no. 4 (Nov., 1992), 583.

  63. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 84,” in The Federalist, 456.

  64. While there are many examples of overlap, these are a few examples from constitutions in use when Liberia declared independence. For press provisions, see Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 15; Massachusetts const. (1780), art. XVI; Tennessee const. (1834), art. I, sec. 19. For juries in libel cases, see Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 15; Michigan const. (1835), art. I, sec. 7; New York const. (1846), art. I, sec. 8; Tennessee const. (1834), art. I, sec. 19; Florida const. (1838), art. I, sec. 15; Texas const. (1845), art. I, sec. 6. For sovereign immunity, see Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 17; Tennessee const. (1834), art. I, sec. 17; Missouri const. (1820), art. I, sec. 25. For bail, see Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 20; Iowa const. (1846), art. I, sec. 12; Texas const. (1845), art. I, sec. 9; Tennessee const. (1834), art. I, sec. 16; Illinois const. (1818), art. VIII, sec. 13. For fear of standing armies, see Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 12; Massachusetts const. (1780), art. XVII; Virginia declaration of rights (1776), sec. 13, this provision is included as part of the Virginia const. (1830), art. I. For the limited application of martial law, see Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 18; Massachusetts const. (1780), art. XXVIII. For the connection of imposts with popular and representative consent, see Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 16; Massachusetts const. (1780), art. XXIII.

  65. U.S. Const., 10th amend.

  66. For discussion of what national citizenship in the USA was prior to the fourteenth amendment, see Lisa Maria Perez, “Citizenship Denied: The “Insular Cases” and the Fourteenth Amendment” Virginia Law Review 94, no. 4 (Jun. 2008), 1052–1053.

  67. U.S. Const., art. I, sec. 2. The fifteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-sixth amendments have since constitutionalized certain standards for suffrage.

  68. U.S. Const., art. V, sec. 17.

  69. Liberia const. (1847), art. II, sec. 2 and 3; art. III, sec. 7. Twelve out of the first fourteen Liberian presidents were born in the USA, including the first ten. The fifteenth was also born outside Liberia, in the British West Indies. See Fred P.M. van der Kraaij, “Presidents of Liberia—in chronological order,” Liberia Past and Present. http://www.liberiapastandpresent.org/Presidents%204.htm.

  70. U.S. Const., amend. 1; Virginia const. (1830), bill of rights, sec. 16.

  71. Liberia const. (1847), art. I, sec. 3; Massachusetts const. (1780), art. III.

  72. Ben Wright, “‘The Heathen Are Demanding the Gospel’: Conversion, Redemption, and African Colonization” in New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 50. See also Gale L. Kenny, “Race, Sympathy, and Missionary Sensibility in the New England Colonization Movement” in New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 33–49; Andrew N. Wegman, “‘He Be God Who Made Dis Man’: Christianity and Conversion in Nineteenth-Century Liberia” in New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 70–89.

  73. Anson G. Phelps, “Appeal in behalf of African Colonization, by the Board of Managers of the New York State Colonization Society” African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825–1849) 19, no. 12 (Dec. 1843), 383.

  74. Liberia Declaration of Independence. See also Burrowes, “Black Christian Republicanism: A Southern Ideology,” 36–37.

  75. Herbert Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 22–23.

  76. Huberich, History, 1:302. For more on women in Liberia during the colonial period, see Debra Newman Ham, “‘Teaching Them to Observe All Things’: African American Women, the Great Commission, and Liberia in the Nineteenth Century” in New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 90.

  77. Liberia const. (1847), art. V, sec. 10–11.

  78. Angela Boswell, “Married Women’s Property Rights and the Challenge to the Patriarchal Order,” in Negotiating the Boundaries of Southern Womanhood: Dealing with the Powers That Be, ed. Janet L. Coryell, Thomas H. Appleton, Jr., Anastasia Sims, Sandra Gioia Treadway (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 92.

  79. Boswell, “Married Women,” 93. See also Peggy A. Rabkin, Fathers to Daughters: The Legal Foundations of Female Emancipation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980), 22; Linda E. Speth, “The Married Women’s Property Acts, 1839–1865: Reform, Reaction, or Revolution?” in Women and the Law: A Social Historical Perspective, ed. D. Kelly Weisberg (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing, 1982), 2:74.

  80. “Monrovia draft,” in Huberich, History, 1:641.

  81. Madison, Notes, 396–403.

  82. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2009), 22–42; John J. Dinan, The American State Constitutional Tradition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 145–149.

  83. Liberia const. (1847), art. II, sec. 2 and 3; art. III, sec. 7. For examples of state constitutions requiring property ownership for office, see Virginia const. (1830), art. III, sec. 7; South Carolina const. (1790), art. I, sec. 4, 6; Massachusetts const. (1780), art. II, sec. 2.

  84. Burrowes, “Black Christian Republicanism: A Southern Ideology,” 35–36.

  85. A Sojourner, “The Cultivation of the Soil—the true road to Independence” African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825–1849) 23, no. 10 (Oct. 1847), 300. For an example of Jefferson’s discussion of agrarianism’s connection to republicanism, see Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia,” in The Portable Jefferson, 216–217. Jefferson, however, did not support placing property requirements for voting or for holding office. See “Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813” Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0446. For a more expansive discussion of the nature of an agricultural republic from a Jeffersonian perspective, see John Taylor of Caroline, Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political: In Sixty-One Numbers, ed. M.E. Bradford (Indianapolis: Libertyfund, 1977).

  86. Tyler-McGraw, African Republic, 165.

  87. U.S. const. art. 1, sec. 8; Militia Act of 1792, May 2, 1792, sec. 1.

  88. U.S. const. art. I, sec. 9; Liberia const. (1847), art. II, sec. 20.

  89. James F. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2006).

  90. Robert F. Williams, “Evolving State Legislative and Executive Power in the Founding Decade” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 496, no. 1 (1988), 43–53; Jordan T. Cash, “George Mason and the Ambiguity of Executive Power” Presidential Studies Quarterly 48, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), 741–767.

  91. Liberia const. (1847), art. II, sec. 5; Liberia const. (1847), art. III, sec. 1.

  92. Joseph Postell, Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017), 95–125.

  93. Liberia const. (1847), art. III, sec. 3–4.

  94. Hamilton, “Federalist 77,” in The Federalist, 407.

  95. James Madison, “Presidential Removal Power; Speeches in Congress, June 16–17, 1789,” in Writings, ed. Ralph Ketcham (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006), 186.

  96. Myers v. U.S., 272 U.S. 52 (1926). For an overview of the debate over the removal power—before and after Myers—see J. David Alvis, Jeremy D. Bailey, and F. Flagg Taylor IV, The Contested Removal Power, 1789–2010 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013). For discussion of John Tyler’s use of removals, see Jordan T. Cash, “The Isolated Presidency: John Tyler and Unilateral Presidential Power” American Political Thought 7, no. 1 (Winter 2018), 36–40.

  97. Liberia const. (1847), art. III, sec. 5–6. See also Madison 2006. For further discussion of the 1820 Tenure of Office Act and Jacksonian rotation in office, see Alvis, Bailey, and Taylor, 64–65; Scott C. James, “Patronage Regimes and American Party Development from ‘The Age of Jackson’ to the Progressive Era” British Journal of Political Science 36, no. 1 (January 2006), 56.

  98. For discussions of executive responsibility in Madison’s defense of the president’s removal power, see Jeremy D. Bailey, James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61–69; Alvis, Bailey, and Taylor, 16–47. For a discussion of stability in Hamilton’s conception of the removal power, see Jeremy D. Bailey, “The New Unitary Executive and Democratic Theory: The Problem of Alexander Hamilton” The American Political Science Review 102, no. 4 (November 2008), 453–465.

  99. See Virginia const. (1830), art. IV, sec. 1; South Carolina const. (1790), art. II, sec. 1.

  100. Liberia const. (1847), art. II, sec. 5; Liberia const. (1847), art. III, sec. 1. Some American states had similar structures for their state senates prior to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down such arrangements as violating the fourteenth amendment’s equal protection clause. See Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).

  101. Andrew Jackson, “First Annual Message to Congress” Miller Center. Accessed June 6, 2019: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-8-1829-first-annual-message-congress. For an overview of these reform efforts, see Bailey, Idea of Presidential Representation, 42–81.

  102. U.S. Const., 17th amend.

  103. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 433–468; Jordan T. Cash, “The Court and the Old Dominion: Judicial Review Among the Virginia Jeffersonians” Law and History Review 35, no. 2 (May 2017), 388–389.

  104. George Washington, “Farewell Address” in Washington: Writings, ed. John H. Rhodehamel (New York: Library of America, 1997), 969.

  105. For more on the American party system up to the 1840s, see Richard J. Ellis, Old Tip vs. The Sly Fox: The 1840 Election and the Making of a Partisan Nation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020); Robert V. Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); John H. Aldrich, Why Parties: A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 67–129.

  106. Hilary Teage, “Address Delivered Before the Liberia Lyceum,” in Burrowes, Black Christian Republicanism, 256.

  107. Carl Patrick Burrows, Power and Press Freedom in Liberia, 1830–1970: The Impact of Globalization and Civil Society on Media-Government Relations (Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc. 2004), 84–87.

  108. For a discussion of the Anti-Federal tradition and how it was adapted by later groups, see Lim, Lovers’ Quarrel; Tulis and Mellow, Legacies of Losing, 53–54.

  109. Douglas R. Egerton, “’Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 4 (Winter, 1985), 466–467; Daniel Preston, “James Monroe and the Practicalities of Emancipation and Colonization” in New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 131–132.

  110. David R. Ericson, “The American Colonization Society’s Not-So-Private Colonization Project” in New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 112–113. Prominent ACS leaders who drew on Jeffersonian political theory to one degree or another included James Madison, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Randolph of Roanoke, and Attorney General Richard Rush who served under both Madison and Monroe.

  111. Tyler-McGraw, African Republic, 71; Burrowes, Black Christian Republicanism, 33. See also Jane Ailes and Marie Tyler-McGraw, “Leaving Virginia for Liberia: Western Virginia Emigrants and Emancipators” West Virginia History 6, no. 2 (Fall 2012), 1–34.

  112. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 20 December 1787. Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0210.

  113. Liberia, “Declaration of Independence.”

  114. Bradley C. Thompson, ed., Anti-Slavery Political Writings, 1833–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 230; Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1860).

  115. Liberia, however, is still somewhat distinct by virtue of being a nation on the eastern side of the Atlantic which was initially colonized by a power on the western side, a geographic reversal of what the republics in the Americas experienced. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

  116. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 1:33–34.

  117. Liberia, “Declaration of Independence.”

  118. Liberia const. (1847), art. V, sec. 13.

  119. Liberia const. (1847), art. V, sec. 12–13.

  120. U.S. const., amend. 14, sec. 1.

  121. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), 403–427; U.S. const., amend. 14, sec. 1.

  122. For a more comprehensive view of race and citizenship in antebellum America, see Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

  123. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 329.

  124. Mills, “United States of Africa” 90.

  125. Liberia, “Declaration of Independence.”

  126. Liberia const. (1847), art. V, sec. 13.

  127. “What ought we to do?” African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825–1849) 21, no. 8 (Aug. 1845), 238.

  128. Beverly R. Wilson qtd. in Sarah J. Hale, Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 248.

  129. “Address of the Colonists to the Free People of Color in the U.S.” in The Independent Republic of Liberia; Its Constitution and Declaration of Independence; Address of the Colonists to the Free People of Color in the United States, with Other Documents; Issued chiefly for the use of the Free People of Color (Philadelphia: William F. Geddes, 1848), 10–11.

  130. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out how these clauses could incentivize immigration to Liberia.

  131. Haiti const. (1846), title II, art. 5–7.

  132. Tommie Shelby, “Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism: Martin Delany on the Meaning of Black Political Solidarity” Political Theory 31, no. 5 (Oct., 2003), 665; Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Wilson J. Moses, ed. Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

  133. “Declaration of Independence.”

  134. Temperly, “African-American Aspirations,” 79.

  135. Liberia const. (1847), art. V, sec. 13.

  136. Liberia const. (1847), art. 5, Sect. 15.

  137. “Act of 1841,” in Huberich, History, 2:1030.

  138. Tyler-McGraw, African Republic, 152.

  139. Temperly, “African-American Aspirations,” 83.

  140. Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 218; Temperly, “African-American Aspirations,” 82. For the original phrase “domestic dependent nations” in reference to Native Americans, see John Marshall’s opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831), 17.

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Cash, J. “A purer form of government”: African American constitutionalism in the founding of Liberia. J Transatl Stud 19, 408–440 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-021-00081-2

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